Records: Top Walker aide at odds with DA as first Doe launched

Three months before Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010, his top Milwaukee County aide wrote a confrontational note to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm demanding an explanation as to why a secret probe had been launched.

"Again, John, why is this a secret John Doe?" wrote Tom Nardelli, former chief of staff to Walker, in a letter to Chisholm. "Why are you going this route? What is the motive?"

The letter was contained in Friday's release of records relating to a secret investigation of aides and associates of Walker. The documents date to when Walker, now the state's governor, was Milwaukee County executive.

Among the many documents is one from 2007 that suggested Walker was looking for ways to blunt union negotiating power on the county level, a prelude to the landmark Act 10 legislation.

In May, Reserve Judge Neal Nettesheim granted a request from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and ordered prosecutors to turn over to Milwaukee County thousands of public records. Nettesheim's action enabled the newspaper and general public to access the cache through the state's open records law.

In the letter to Chisholm — which appears to have been written in August 2010 — Nardelli said his office had gone to prosecutors to raise concerns about funds missing from Operation Freedom, a veterans event hosted by the county.

But Nardelli told Chisholm that he was surprised that investigators had seized the computer of former Walker aide Darlene Wink and were attempting to do the same with Timothy D. Russell, a longtime Walker confidante. Nardelli accused Chisholm of using "a backdoor effort to look at a computer of someone who wasn't even assigned to this office during the period in question."

"We requested this investigation. Why did you request a John Doe?" Nardelli wrote. "What is your motive in doing so?"

The documents don't include a response from Chisholm.

The first John Doe investigation netted six convictions, including a major Walker donor, two Walker staffers and an appointee. The probe launched by Chisholm lasted nearly three years and ended in March 2013. (Information developed in that investigation led to another probe; that one was halted this year by a federal judge, and Chisholm is now trying to revive it.)

Russell later pleaded to a felony count of stealing more than $21,000 from the veterans' organization. Wink received probation for two misdemeanor counts of doing campaign work on county time.

Nardelli also wrote a memo on Aug. 17, 2010, detailing his meeting Chisholm regarding the length of the probe.

"He (Chisholm) said there are times when a matter takes you into a different direction than initially planned and that can add time to any review," Nardelli wrote.

"I indicated that I was suspicious of motives given the time it's taken to resolve. He assured me that he would not allow his role as a prosecutor to be influenced by outside 'political' agenda regardless of the partisan nature we are currently living in."

In May 2010 — more than a year after Walker's staff raised the issue — Chisholm's office was authorized to launch the John Doe probe after a prosecutor complained that Walker's office was refusing to cooperate on the matter. A John Doe allows prosecutor to seize documents and compel testimony in secret while pursuing a possible criminal matter.

Walker has said repeatedly that he and his campaign cooperated with the probe. No one currently with Walker's administration, nor Walker himself, was charged as a result of the investigation.

Nardelli's note suggests that he believed Chisholm's office was not aggressively pursuing the theft allegation at Operation Freedom.

"He had no excuse for the lack of response to my repeated calls to his team seeking a response to our concerns from the very beginning!" Nardelli wrote.

The note was drafted just days before the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel disclosed in August 2010 that investigators raided the office of Russell, then Walker's housing director, and seized his computer. Two days after the computer was taken by authorities, Walker said he knew nothing about the seized computer.

Among the information released Friday were documents from Russell's hard drive, including an archive of more than 1,000 pages of the ScottForGov.com blog.

The blog boosted Walker in 2010 as he ran against former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann in the Republican primary for governor. Walker's campaign repeatedly denied any association with the blog at the time, but documents released this year showed it was run by Russell's partner, Brian Pierick, and that Walker signed off on the name of the blog.

The earlier release of documents and the blog archive on Russell's county computer conflict with denials from Walker's campaign in 2010.

"We don't know who does Scott for Gov, and that blog is not sanctioned or affiliated with our campaign," Walker's spokeswoman at the time, Jill Bader, emailed the Journal Sentinel in May 2010.

Bader is now a spokeswoman for the Republican State Leadership Committee. She did not respond to questions on Friday and earlier this year about her 2010 denial.

In 2009, Walker personally approved the name of the blog, the Journal Sentinel reported this year.

Alleigh Marré, Walker's current spokeswoman, said the campaign stood by its 2010 denials of knowledge about who ran the blog.

The cache of documents included an array of files dealing with county budgets and running government programs, as well as more mundane matters, such as a list of the birthdays for Walker's family members and top aides.

Information from Walker's computer hard drive showed a politician immersed in policy. It also provided insight into Walker's interests, including his annual trek across the state on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Walker's computer files made clear what he expected first from county cabinet appointees: loyalty to him.

It was the first expectation listed in a 2007 planning document for the cabinet. In a 2008 document of expectations for the Parks Department, then led by Sue Black, a list of 18 points begins and ends with the same message: "Work with the County Board, but work for me."

There was a copy of Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," as well as a 2004 letter from Walker in support of changing the name of Cudahy's Park View Elementary School to Ronald W. Reagan Elementary School.

One document was labeled "Big Ideas for 2008." That memo proposed breaking Milwaukee Public Schools into smaller districts, outsourcing court staff, moving county mental health patients to leased space at St. Michael's Hospital and selling land to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for a new engineering school.

It also included the idea of turning over fire service at the airport to the Milwaukee Fire Department and leasing out the airport and possibly using the proceeds for transit services.

Walker's computer also contained a 2008 memo on reinventing government that discussed three options — eliminating county government and spinning off its duties to other local government; eliminating all local governments in Milwaukee County and forming a new metropolitan government for the region; and consolidating county services with those of suburban communities.

The initiative, which never got off the ground, had a "target date" of April 2012.

Another file on Walker's hard drive, from February 2007, proposed creating a system that would limit salary and wage increases for county employees to the rate of inflation and would prevent employee unions from going to arbitration over pay. This system would have been similar to the so-called qualified economic offer that limited the compensation increases that teachers could win through union bargaining. The idea appeared to go nowhere.

Four years later, after Walker became governor, he went further than that and all but eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers. Public-sector unions are now barred from negotiating over raises higher than inflation, and they cannot bargain over any other issues.

It was unclear if the 2007 plan was created by Walker's office or if it was an idea he picked up elsewhere. The one-paragraph memo was produced in conjunction with a Wisconsin County Executives and Administrators Association meeting.

The hard drive contained two detailed memos from 2006 labeled "War Room" that said Walker's office needed to have key contacts among major industries, ethnic and religious groups, and proponents of causes to expand voucher schools and support veterans. One memo said Walker's office needed to have a contact in every aldermanic district in the county and spelled out a strategy for reaching out to the media and scheduling events with Rotary Clubs, trade associations and a host of other groups.

It was not clear from the document if Walker wrote the plan himself or if someone on his staff created it for him or others.

"The War Room" is the title of a 1993 documentary about Bill Clinton's first run for the presidency.

About Dave Umhoefer

Dave Umhoefer covers local politics and government as part of the PolitiFact Wisconsin and Watchdog teams. His investigation into pension padding by Milwaukee County employees won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize.